Chapter 5: 5 Burst

The first time I had scared my parents I was three. I remember my parents telling me about it more than my own experience of it.

My favorite toy hadn’t been a stuffed animal, or some special blanket. It had been a toy monster where you could exchange its arms, legs or head for other pieces. The wooden toy had been my world, every day I would exchange its pieces to marvel at the new monster in front of me.

However, eventually I ran out of combinations, and my young developing brain wanted more.

My parents had been in the office when a servant informed them that lunch had been prepared. They had wanted to grab me themselves, back then they had still been the doting rich father and mother that spoiled their child a bit too much.

But when they opened the door to my room, I was sitting in a pool of my own blood. A steak knife in my hand and a stick I had gotten from who knows where on the ground. I had been trying to carve new pieces for my toy.

Being a three year old with no experience with a blade I had sliced my hand open from the tip of my right thumb nearly to my wrist.

There had been no screams, and only a few tears. Instead I had watched my opened hand with a fascination that had sent chills down my parents spine. I had inspected the small amount of bone that was visible, lightly touching the fleshy part of my palm, I had even licked up a bit of the blood to see what it tasted like.

They had rushed in, calling for a medic and trying to stop the bleeding. I had smiled, blood staining my teeth. They told me four years later that I gave them nightmares for years afterwards. Not in fear for me, but of me.

From that moment on my parents had never treated me the same. To them I was touched in the head, after all what kid didn’t scream when they cut themselves with a knife. A nanny was assigned to watch my every move. They had even gotten me a dog named Burst.

Since my endeavor to create new appendages for my little toy had failed I moved my curiosities to the nearest thing of interest for my four year old mind.

The grandfather clock in the hallway.

I had tried to knock it over and break it so I could learn how it worked, but I wasn’t strong enough. My grandfather however had apparently had a hobby as a watchmaker, and my father in turn had learned quite a bit about clocks and watches from his father in law.

So he had taken it upon himself to teach me, my uncoordinated fingers that hadn’t even been able to hold a knife properly were then able to take apart a relatively cheap grandfather clock and put it back together. Then I was able to do it on our more expensive one. After that it was pocket and wrist watches.

Wheel’s, axis’, winding mechanisms, springs, plates, screws, barrels, bridges, hands, escapement. The beautiful escapement. The first time I put together a watch and I heard the tick I felt as though I gained a second heart.

The ever so slight vibration of the teeth realigning, the reassuring sound that told me everything was in working order. It had reassured and calmed me in a way I had never felt before, that not even the embrace of a parent had made me feel.

They say that when you are in close proximity with someone you love your heartbeats sync up with one another. To me I could feel my heart sync up with the ticking of the watch.

I continued like that until I was seven. My knowledge and understanding had shown that I wasn’t mentally deficient, I had even seemed to be several leagues ahead of other children my age. Sure I had an odd fascination with how watches worked, and the white scar on my right hand was a reminder of a scary night.

Still, my parents would no longer hold me as I went to sleep, and their hugs and kisses had become detached. Like it was just another task to complete in the day instead of something they found joy in.

But I was smart, I didn’t have social skills, but I was able to feed myself, and bathe myself. They could still accept me.

Then Burst had died. The dog had been my best companion, it would lay its head in my lap as I worked on my watches or schoolwork. I loved it, even when its fur would get in my equipment I would still love it, when it bumped its head against my desk and I ended up scratching a wheel, or bending a spring. I would kindly admonish Burst and get back to work.

He had gotten sick and died, that simply. He had been young and seemingly healthy, but in the span of a week he died.

My parents had cried with me, they too had loved the dog, but they still had jobs to do. They left for some meeting and I was left with the corpse of my dog and a servant to watch over me.

The servant quickly got tired of my tears and left to nap.

Then it had just been me and Burst.

Why, why had he died. What was the reason, the cause for it. Where was the malfunction, the broken piece.

I needed to know why Burst stopped ticking.

So I went to the kitchen, grabbed the same knife I had used to slice open my thumb, and went to work.

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I had never skinned anything before, but years of precise working with timepieces had trained my hands to be steady. I opened up Burst from throat to groin, peeling away a diamond of skin like a sticker from paper, ever so careful not to damage the organs.

After all, how would I learn what the issue had been if I destroyed the vital pieces of the specimen.

I carefully gutted Burst, using the white sheet of my bed to place the organs on. My similarly white watchmakers finger gloves and the sheet had quickly been dyed red, pink and brown by the various pieces of Burst.

I had no idea what half of the organs were at the time. The heart and stomach were easy enough, the lungs took a bit of time to understand. But I had found out the reason, the cause, the broken piece.

There had been a cut in Burst’s intestines, very slight, but it had let out waste and had become infected. I would learn months later that it was called sepsis.

My parents walked in then.

They had screamed, falling on their rears as their seven year old boy laughed and cried as he finally found out the reason his dog stopped working. Why it stopped ticking.

After that my parents sent me away, I barely had the time to process that they were upset with me before I was on the train alone to my grandparents in Eichlin. I was lucky to not have been kidnapped or robbed, let alone lost.

Eichlin had been a small city in the corner of the Sun State where my grandparents had gone to retire, leaving my mother with their business. I hadn’t seen them in years but they took me in immediately.

After reading the letter my mother had left for them my grandmother had been a bit distant but my grandfather had taken me aside.

He hadn’t acted angry or scared, but worried. We talked for hours and I told him how I didn’t think I had been doing something wrong.

I had been trying to find out why Burst had died, when he asked why I had been at a loss for words. It took me several minutes to sort out my thoughts, but my grandfather was a patient man so he just stood and waited as I zoned out.

“I wanted to find out how Burst worked, what made him tick. Then I, uh, wanted to know what went wrong. Like how even a single speck of dust can interfere with a watch's function.”

“You know even if you did find that piece of dust in Burst it wouldn’t have brought him back right?”

“I… I think so, but I don’t know why. If I fixed the issue and put him back together why wouldn’t he start working again?”

“Living, say living, others will treat you badly if you speak about their dead loved ones as though they are watches.”

“But why, we’re similar in a lot of ways.”

My grandfather had shrugged.

“Some people can’t accept that other people's brains work differently, and they use that to dehumanize them. As for why just putting the dog back together wouldn’t have worked, it's because living organisms are very fragile, like a watch. If just a single thing gets thrown off kilter then the whole system can fall apart. Once it gets so bad that the person stops functioning like they should it is very difficult to ever go back to how it once was. Like if a piece of the watch gets warped, it affects the rest of the device right? And even if you reshape it the watch still will have an imperfection, the metal now bearing the scars of its warping.”

“Why can’t we just give eachother new pieces then. Like if I got another dog’s… whatever that thing was called and put it in place of where Burst’s was?”

“Hmm, doctors have been trying to learn how to do such things recently but they are having difficulties. People and animals are much more complex than any watch.”

A feeling like when I had found the infected wound in Bursts intestines welled up within me.

“But that means it’s possible then? Even if it might be difficult or more complex, is it still possible?”

“Yes, I believe so.”

It was like my entire world had expanded. I imagined a human body in front of me, it being made of incredibly complex bio machinery. A puzzle that was already put together but not yet understood.

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I like dogs don't worry

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